IRIX 4.00 ?

[Russell J Fulton;ccc032u]

benedict at chaos.utexas.edu (Thomas Benedict) writes:

>Say, I've been seeing several postings refering to IRIX 4.00 coming
>out someday.  Sounds good.  But specifically I was wondering if any of
>the following were intended to be stuck into 4.00:

>IRIX seems to have a problem keeping names straight, especially with
>regards to talk.  At this point incorrect names seem to be more the
>norm than the exception.  For instance, if I try to talk to someone
>else on the system they may see it as a request for a talk from
>someone other than me.  On one occasion someone got a request to talk
>from himself.

This is a problem which is caused by processes not locking the utmp and wtmp
files when they write to it. It causes the library routine cuserid to be
unreliable on machines with lots of users. (The more users the more likely
utmp and wtmp will get corrupt because of two processes writing to them
at the same time.) 

This problem is not confined to Irix, its inherent in AT&T sysV. Some other
vendors have fixed it and we are putting the heat on to get SGI to fix it
as well. Maybe it will be fixed as result of the merge of SYSV and BSD?

This bug also screws up connect time logging as done by the standard 
accounting software and sometimes even causes the accounting run to
fail completely.

Another particularly nasty effect is that when creating new users you use 
the option of letting the user set the password on first logon then sometimes
the wrong password gets changed!

Cheers, Russell.
-- 
Russell Fulton, Computer Center, University of Auckland, New Zealand.
<rj_fulton at aukuni.ac.nz>